This Isn’t the Same Stormy Daniels
The night she met Donald Trump changed both their worlds.
For months, Stormy Daniels’s life had been in a state of suspended animation as she prepared to be called as a witness in Donald Trump’s criminal trial in Manhattan. “She’s just been waiting to testify,” a person close to her said. “Her mind-set is that this is a justice system that hasn’t protected her, and yet she’s here spending her money, her own time, and taking time off work and risking her safety to show up for a legal system that didn’t show up for her.” Daniels arrived at the courthouse accompanied by her longtime bodyguard, Travis. “She was concerned about having government-appointed security,” the person close to her continued, “because she doesn’t trust the government anymore. She doesn’t trust that they’re going to protect her. She doesn’t trust that the legal system is going to protect her after everything that she’s been through.” At a social event earlier this spring, Daniels was “anxious, nervous, and talking fast” in the same manner that she would address the court, the person close to her recalled. “It’s very, very stressful for her.”
Daniels had been telling her story, in various forms and formats, for going on seven years now. She’d done TV interviews, magazine spreads, her own podcast, other people’s podcasts, a stand-up comedy tour and a Peacock documentary called Stormy. But there is a difference between telling your truth and testifying. The rule of law does not always accommodate what feels righteous, and the workings of the system can grind down even the unindicted. Another witness for the prosecution, Hope Hicks, cried when she testified. During jury selection, several prospective jurors also broke down in tears; one said she had to quit because she was overwhelmed by anxiety. Daniels has always prided herself on her toughness, but the pressure had taken a toll. “I didn’t ask for this,” she said back in April 2023, a few days after Trump was charged with falsifying business records to conceal a deal to keep her quiet about their alleged sexual relationship ahead of the 2016 presidential election. “I’m significantly more crazy now than I was before,” she said with a laugh. “Because it does wear on you.” She’d been paid off, and, as she saw it, she’d been paying for it ever since.
This one night of her life in 2006, when she said she agreed to have dinner with Trump in his Lake Tahoe hotel suite and ended up sleeping with him, had haunted her for 17 years. If you didn’t count the insults he lobbed at her in public, or the contract she signed, drawn up by his attorney and now at the heart of the criminal case against him, she hadn’t even communicated with him since 2007. Yet her entire existence had been at risk of becoming all about him all the time. And over the years, the story and its meaning to her had evolved in her mind, from an amusing episode in a colorful life full of them, to a secret that imperiled her personal life and her physical safety, to a valuable commodity that posed a mortal threat to the Trump campaign when it appeared to be in a death spiral after the publication of the Access Hollywood tape. Now, the events of that night were at the center of a criminal case that could potentially cost Trump another election and even his freedom, and her the ability to live anything resembling a normal life, a life not defined by her strange connection to this deeply strange and strangely powerful man.
Now, she was about to meet him again — in a courtroom.
“The people call Stormy Daniels,” Assistant District Attorney Susan Hoffinger said on Tuesday morning. The witness entered through a side door, walking briskly to the stand without a glance at the defendant, her heels clacking across the silent courtroom. She was dressed in all black, as if for mourning, a billowing cape with a hood riding up to reveal the tattoos on her arms. She wore black-rimmed glasses and a black beaded necklace. The black roots of her hair peeked out from beneath a pile of blonde.
Like so many others who have come in contact with Trump, Daniels had been warped by her experience, changed in ways she described in court. “I was front and foremost everywhere,” Daniels testified on Tuesday, as she described the “chaos” that descended on her life. “People on the front lawn. My husband asking questions. My friends asking questions.” Her neighbors in Texas, where she then lived, learned that there was a porn star next door. Her child was ostracized from playgroups. People she thought she knew betrayed her. Trump supporters harassed her and shared violent fantasies about hurting her. She worried constantly that she was on the verge of losing everything she had worked for since she clawed her way out of poverty when she started stripping at 17 and made herself, by the time she met Trump, the highest paid and most celebrated director and performer in porn.
“I used to be very adamant that I’m not a victim,” she said in 2023, speaking on her patio, “but I kind of am at this point.” Trump claimed he was the victim too — of an extortion plot and a political witch hunt. A jury will now have to decide whose narrative is more credible with maybe nothing less than the fate of the nation hanging on its verdict.
In pretrial motions, Trump’s defense team had attempted to keep Daniels from taking the stand. His lawyers argued that her account of their alleged hotel-room encounter was “at the very best peripheral” to the felony charges in the case. They contended that testimony about a sex act was gratuitous in a case involving financial transactions and was likely to be “unduly prejudicial.” Trump’s pretrial brief cited a January interview Daniels gave in which she had suggested she was “biting my tongue so fucking hard right now” as she looked forward to facing Trump in the courtroom. Her 2018 memoir, Full Disclosure, included many details that would be humiliating for a jury to hear, including a description of what she called his “unusual penis” and her assessment that it was possibly “the least impressive sex I’d ever had.”
Before the witness and the jury entered the courtroom on Tuesday, Trump’s attorneys renewed their objection. “There really is no reason for it to be coming into the case about books and records,” said Susan Necheles, the highly regarded Manhattan criminal defender who took on the sensitive task of cross-examining Daniels. Hoffinger countered that Daniels’s story was crucial, arguing that it “completes the story of the events that precipitated the payoff.” The prosecutor said the testimony would be “very basic” and would not “involve any descriptions of genitalia or anything of that nature.”
“There’s a very real question about the credibility of this woman,” Necheles said. “We shouldn’t be getting into how she felt about it, what happened in the room.”
“I agree with you that she has got credibility issues,” said Judge Juan Merchan. And for that reason, he ruled that it was “all the more important” for the jury to hear what Daniels had to say, while saying prosecutors didn’t “need to go into any details about the sexual act itself.”
As soon as Daniels took the stand, though, it became clear that she was determined to share everything. Since becoming a resistance celebrity, she has turned what she calls the “worst 90 seconds of my life” into material for her entertainment career. (One of the authors of this article was a paid consultant for the Stormy documentary.) The defense would like the jury to perceive this as evidence that Daniels has been eager to remain associated with Trump after their encounter, that this was in some sense a best-case scenario of her plan to extort him from the start. A more charitable interpretation is that Daniels is a hustler and survivor with a sense of justice, a knack for public relations, and a feel for the market. Stuck in circumstances legal and political and in any case well beyond her control, was she supposed to step back from her public persona, already established before all this, and wither?
Vibrant and comical, with an eye for detail and an inclination toward the confessional, Daniels is a natural storyteller and often her own best character. The strongest material in her memoir is not about Trump but about her childhood and her early experiences working in strip clubs. Daniels is always Daniels, whether on the page or in conversation, but in face-to-face encounters, she has an open and hyperactive communication style, often veering off course for entertaining asides or introspection. On the stand, she spilled out her story in an acid whirl. She digressed, wisecracked, and at times contradicted herself. She described her hard childhood, her high-school activities (newspaper, ballet, horseback riding), and her discovery as a teenager that she could make more money dancing than she could “shoveling manure eight hours a day.” She said her move into adult films was a considered career decision. With pride, she noted that she directed and wrote movies, too.
“Yes, some adult films have real scripts,” Daniels said, “and are real movies, not just, ‘Oh, I am sorry, Mr. Pizza Boy,’ which is very offensive to me.”
She testified about meeting Trump in 2006 at a celebrity golf tournament in Lake Tahoe, where Wicked, the production company she worked for, had a hospitality tent along the course.
“Yes, I know it’s very funny,” Daniels said in one of her rapid-fire asides. “We are an adult-film company sponsoring one of the holes.” No one in the courtroom laughed.
Daniels recounted that she was with a group of other Wicked stars and was introduced as an actress and a director, prompting Trump to say that she “must be the smart one.” She claimed she had never watched The Apprentice but knew who Trump was and said that he was “probably as old or older than my father.” She handed him a DVD of one of her films. Afterward, Trump’s longtime bodyguard, Keith Schiller, asked Daniels for her phone number and said his boss wanted to have dinner.
“And what did you say at that time?” Hoffinger asked.
“F- no,” Daniels said.
“I am sorry?”
“No,” Daniels clarified, “but with an expletive in the front.”
Daniels testified that she ultimately accepted Trump’s invitation on the advice of her publicist, who told her it would make for a “great story” and added, “What could possibly go wrong?” She went up to his penthouse suite at the Harrah’s hotel, which she described as “three times the size of my apartment.” Trump met her wearing “silk or satin pajamas,” she said, but he changed his clothes after she compared him to Hugh Hefner. They chatted for a while about her business, and Trump flattered her by asking attentive and respectful questions: “Did porn stars have a union?”; “How often was she HIV tested?” She in turn asked him about an upcoming WrestleMania appearance: Trump and Vince McMahon were supposed to face off in what was billed as the “Battle of the Billionaires,” with the winner shaving the loser’s head. “Donald Trump has always been famous for his ’do,” Daniels remarked. Trump, who won, told her the fight was fixed. She said they also discussed his wife, Melania, and he told her, “Don’t worry about that, we actually don’t even sleep in the same room.” (Politico reported that Daniels punctuated that particular barb by looking at the jury and mouthing the word “Wow.”)
At the defense table, Trump appeared to be saying something to his lead attorney, Todd Blanche, who was hunched over, shaking his head. Despite Hoffinger’s assurance that morning that Daniels would stick to basic details, the witness was delivering a mortifying monologue and, for some reason, the defense was not offering objections. The atmosphere grew painfully tense. In the rows of benches behind the defense table, where the former president’s operatives and supporters sit, Eric Trump — the sole member of the family who has attended any portion of the proceedings — was staring rigidly down at his lap, possibly looking at a phone (though phone use is not permitted in the courtroom — a rule Donald Trump himself has violated) or maybe just averting his eyes.
Daniels kept barreling along, telling the jury that she had scolded Trump for talking over her and then picked up a magazine with his face on its cover. “I said, ‘Turn around,’” she said. “And I swatted him right on the butt.” She testified that it was at this point that Trump “got really quiet” and suggested she might make a good contestant on Celebrity Apprentice. Then he asked whether she had any friends who were in town. She called up another actress she knew from the industry, Alana Evans, then she quoted Trump asking the woman, “Why don’t you come over and hang out with us?”
Reporters in the gallery exchanged slack-jawed glances, wondering how far the story was going to go. At this point, Merchan interrupted the prosecutor in the middle of a question and suggested a recess. He called the lawyers up to the bench for a sidebar discussion, where he told Blanche that his client had just been “cursing audibly” and “shaking his head visually” in the view of the witness and the jury.
“That’s contemptuous,” Merchan said. “You need to speak to him. I won’t tolerate that.”
During prior civil trials, Trump threw tantrums in court, but to this point, his conduct in Merchan’s courtroom had been sedate. (Outside the room is another matter: Merchan has threatened to jail him for contempt for his statements about the jury and witnesses, including Daniels.) Trump often appears to doze off during testimony, although he has denied he is sleeping, posting on his social-media platform that he merely closes his “beautiful blue eyes” to “listen intensely and take it ALL in!!!” But Daniels, like other women who have previously angered him in court, appeared to trip a wire inside him. He returned from the recess with a flushed face and sour expression.
Merchan appeared to recognize that Daniels was venturing into dangerous territory. If the jury heard too much prejudicial information, the defense could call for a mistrial and would have grounds to overturn a conviction on appeal. On a more practical level, it might look as if he were vindicating Trump’s claim that the whole Manhattan prosecution is a really a persecution meant to hurt him politically. “I think the degree of detail that we’re going into here is just unnecessary,” Merchan told prosecutors before Daniels returned to the stand. But Daniels was not present for the instruction, and she seemed oblivious as she continued on, to the judge’s mounting annoyance.
Daniels picked up the story inside Trump’s hotel bathroom, where she said she snooped through his leather toiletry bag, taking note of the cheap shampoo and the bottle of Old Spice as well a gold manicure kit. She said she tried to call her friend Alana again, but “at this point she wanted no part of whatever I had going on.” Then, however, her testimony took a jarring shift. What had previously seemed like a playful scenario — a rich man, an invitation, a spanking, the implied possibility of a threesome — turned, in Daniels’s telling, into something unexpected and nonconsensual.
“When I opened the bathroom door to come out, Mr. Trump had come into the bedroom and was on the bed, basically between myself and the exit,” Daniels testified. He was, she said, stripped down to his boxers and a T-shirt. “That’s when I had that moment where I felt the room spin in slow motion. I felt the blood basically leave my hands and my feet … I just thought, Oh my God, what did I misread to get here?”
Daniels testified that she walked around the bed, and Trump stood up to position himself between her and the door. “He said, ‘I thought we were getting somewhere,’” she said. “If you ever want to get out of that trailer park …”
“Objection,” Necheles said.
“Sustained,” Merchan ruled and icily added: “Move on.”
“I am sorry, judge,” Daniels said. “I don’t understand.”
She tried to pick up the story. “I just think I blacked out.”
Necheles objected again, and Daniels was prodded to clarify, for the record, that she was not insinuating she had been drugged.
“Did you feel threatened by him?” Hoffinger asked.
“No, not physically,” Daniels replied. “Although, I did note there was a bodyguard right outside the door. There was an imbalance of power for sure.”
“Can you very briefly describe where you had sex with him?”
“The next thing I know, I was on the bed,” Daniels replied. “I had my clothes and shoes off. I believe my bra, however, was still on. We were in the missionary position.”
“Objection,” Necheles said.
“Sustained.”
Daniels had understood for years what transpired between her and Trump through the idea of her own agency. It’s still there, when she recounts details about insulting him, or making him change out of his pajamas, or instructing him to bend over so she could spank him. She maintained a fundamental belief that self-empowerment could be found in sex so long as sexual capital was wielded with good intentions. Having or withholding sex to manipulate someone was not empowerment, for instance, while speaking up in bed or safely experimenting was. And in the beginning, she had thought of her standoff with Trump as a battle of egos between two equals, and she had felt that she had won, which was why, in her telling of the story, what came next was so disappointing. The sight of Trump perched on the edge of the bed was not only ominous because it implied sex that she did not want to have. Worse than that, it implied a room she had not properly read. It implied that she had been foolish to think his interest in her could have been about anything else.
“I had a sense of a vacuum taking all of the air out of the room and me deflating with it,” she wrote in her memoir. “I sighed inwardly, keenly aware of two thoughts in that one moment. There was a simple, Oh fuck. Here we go. But there was also a much more complex, sad feeling that none of what he said was true. He didn’t respect me. Everything he said to me was bullshit. And I was mad at myself. How did I miss this?”
Over time, having lived and relived the story of that night so many times, with the perspective of a woman almost two decades older who is now the mother of a daughter, her interpretation of the power dynamics between her and Trump had changed. Nuances that had not been apparent to her at the time came into sharper relief more recently. She still does not call it rape. She did not say “no.” But she thought more seriously about the fact that she did not say “yes.” On her patio in 2023, she said, “It was not rape. I was very adamant in the beginning about saying I wasn’t a victim. But looking back? I kind of was.” But what might look like an evolution of understanding to her could look like inconsistency to a jury. On cross-examination, which will continue on Thursday, Trump’s defense team is certain to attack any discrepancies between the account she told in court and the versions she has recounted on many previous occasions.
As a technical matter, there was no reason the prosecution had to call Daniels to testify. The crime that is alleged, 34 counts of falsifying business records, involves Trump’s payment to Michael Cohen, his middleman. The evidence of those transactions was introduced on Monday in stultifying testimony from various former employees of the Trump Organization’s accounting department. Having called Hope Hicks to testify about Trump’s desperation after the Access Hollywood tape went public, it hardly seemed necessary to establish his motive. But the DA’s office argued it was relevant to show just how damaging her story might have been to him had it come out in 2016. In that sense, on Tuesday, Trump may have turned himself into a muttering, cursing exhibit. But the decision to call Daniels as a witness could prove to be an error for the prosecution. The defense is hoping to win an acquittal — or more likely a mistrial — by convincing jurors that he was the target of a shakedown. By calling Daniels, and having her spill her embarrassing details, the prosecutors ran the risk the making it look as if they were piling on and reinforcing Trump’s claims of victimization.
Daniels gave a contradictory account of her feelings about the alleged encounter and the way she handled it afterward. She said she dined out on her story of visiting Trump in his hotel room but claimed that “the sex part, I told very few very close people.” She said that Trump would call her up frequently, referring to her as “honeybunch,” and she would sometimes put him on speakerphone on the sets of the movies she was shooting, so “dozens and dozens of people” could listen in. She encountered Trump again at a Los Angeles party for a vodka he was promoting, where he introduced her to his friend “Karen” — as in Karen McDougal, another alleged mistress who also has figured in the trial testimony — and invited Daniels back up to his hotel room. (She claims she made up an excuse.) Daniels said she met him twice more, including once at Trump Tower, but they never had sex again, she claims, and he never cast her as she had hoped on Celebrity Apprentice.
Four years later, in 2011, Daniels testified that she learned through Gina Rodriguez, a talent manager, that someone in the gossip industry might be working on a story about her and Trump. She brokered a $15,000 deal to tell a sanitized version of her story to In Touch Weekly. “You can’t let somebody else make the money off of you,” Daniels explained. “You can make sure that it’s accurate and get paid.” But the story never ran, and she testified that she later heard it was killed after Trump, through his attorney Michael Cohen, threatened to sue. Shortly after the interview, Daniels claims she was threatened over the story by an unknown man in a Las Vegas parking lot. When an unauthorized story reporting the rumors about her encounter with Trump later appeared on a gossip website called The Dirty, Daniels hired a lawyer, Keith Davidson, to issue a denial and get the story taken down.
She testified that the parking-lot incident left her fearful that Trump, or people close to him, might be trying to hurt her. Nonetheless, the evidence in the criminal case indicates that in the summer of 2016, as Trump clinched the Republican presidential nomination, Rodriguez began to explore if there were new buyers for her client’s story. “My motivation wasn’t money, it’s to get the story out,” Daniels testified. “It was motivated out of fear, not money.” She said that she believed if the story was out there, no one would dare harm her. In the next breath, though, she admitted she was more than willing to hush the story up by selling the rights to it to Cohen. She explained the seeming contradiction by saying the deal would create an incriminating paper trail.
In his earlier testimony, Davidson claimed that Daniels almost blew up the deal when Cohen delayed in paying her $130,000. “I was afraid that if it wasn’t done” before the election, she said, “that I wouldn’t be safe, or that he would never pay, and there wouldn’t be a trail to keep me safe.” In the end, she ended up clearing $96,000 after paying fees to all the brokers. But the secret did not stay quiet for long, and once it got out, her whole life changed.
After the Wall Street Journal reported details of the deal she made with Cohen in January 2018, Daniels hired a lawyer, Michael Avenatti, who turned out to be an egomaniacal crook. He filed a lawsuit against Trump, claiming his denial of involvement in the alleged parking-lot threat amounted to defamation. Daniels testified that she thought the lawsuit was “really risky” and a “bad choice” but went along with it anyway. A judge ruled that Trump’s speech was protected by the First Amendment and awarded him the cost of his legal fees. Daniels has vowed to “go to jail before I pay a penny” of the amount she owes. As Necheles began her cross-examination, late in the afternoon, she questioned Daniels closely about her efforts to avoid paying Trump the $560,000 she owes — a huge sum for her but a paltry one for a man worth billions.
“That story has made you a lot of money,” Necheles said.
“It’s also cost me a lot of money,” Daniels shot back.
Before the cross-examination began, the defense had made a motion for a mistrial, claiming that Daniels had blown right through the “guardrails” that prosecutors had promised to erect around her testimony. “There is no way to un-ring the bell,” Blanche said. The account of the sexual encounter itself had been both damning and different in substance than anything Daniels was saying back in 2016. “The mere fact that she says there was consent after saying she blacked out,” Blanche said, “is the kind of testimony that makes it impossible to come back from. I mean, you know, not even talking about the fact that we are talking about somebody who is going to go out and campaign this afternoon and how unfair it is in that environment, as well.”
“I agree that there were some things that would probably have been better left unsaid,” Merchan conceded. But then he turned his scorn on the defense. “I was surprised there were not more objections,” he said. “When you say the bell has been rung, you have to take responsibility to some degree for that.”
These will all be issues that will no doubt be raised on appeal. Perhaps, as in the case of Harvey Weinstein, a higher court will someday find that the judge erred in allowing the jury to hear too much. Such a decision, likely years away, will matter little to the defendant, who is solely focused on winning vindication in November. In the initial stages of her cross-examination, Necheles focused on Daniels’s animus toward Trump, which she freely admitted. The jury saw posts in which he called her “horseface” and in which she called him the “orange turd.”
“You despise him, and you made fun of how he looks,” Necheles said.
“Yes,” Daniels said in a taunting voice. “’Cause he made fun of me first.”
A few drops of sweat glistened on the tip of Trump’s nose after he returned from the afternoon recess. Necheles began to direct her fire on Daniels’s motivations.
“So you decided, well, ‘I’m going to sell my story,’ right?” Necheles asked.
“I was very different and a much braver person in 2016 than I was in 2011. Because Donald Trump was not just a guy on television, he was running for president. I was more afraid for my situation.”
Daniels said that at one point, she had even considered holding a press conference to tell her story to the world for free. “And you didn’t give a free press conference, did you?” Necheles replied.
“I didn’t have to.”
“You were looking to extort money from President Trump, right?”
“False,” Daniels said with a raised voice.
Necheles handed her a series of texts that showed Rodriguez negotiating a price with the editor of the National Enquirer.
“To be quite honest,” Daniels conceded, “she had hoped to get the story out and make some money.”
“You wanted to get some money?”
“Get the story out,” she replied, “and make some money.”
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